250. (4) Analysis of English imports in the modern period.—After this survey of one side of English trade we have to consider the other, the imports which England purchased with her surplus wares. In round millions of pounds the imports at the end of the eighteenth century were as follows, in the order of their values: sugar 7.1, tea 3.1, grain 2.7, Irish linen 2.6, cotton 2.3, coffee 2.2, wood 1.5, butter 1.0, tobacco 1.0, hemp 1.0. These wares amounted to more than half of a total import of 42.6. If the list were extended to less important wares a number of manufactured goods would be found on it, but these evidently could in general be produced to better advantage in England than anywhere else. England had already made herself the “workshop of the world,” and drew from other countries mainly raw materials and foods which could not be produced at home. Some of the colonial imports were shipped again, as will be shown later, but a large proportion of them was consumed at home by a population which was not only growing in size, but was enabled by means of commerce to gratify its taste for products comparatively new (sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco).

251. (5) Sources of the imports.—At the period when these figures were compiled war had interrupted the trade of England with France and the Netherlands, but an active commerce still continued with other parts of the Continent. The imports from European countries were largely minor manufactures, which do not appear in the list above, but raw materials also were furnished by the less advanced European states. Wool came from Spain; hemp, flax, and tallow from Russia; wood, iron, and copper from Scandinavia.

For some of the most important imports we must look to countries outside of Europe. The trade with Asia supplied all of the tea, and part at least of the other commodities (coffee, cotton, sugar) which we now associate with America, as well as a considerable amount of Indian manufactures, especially textiles. This trade still rested in the control of the East India Company, which had grown to be a great political power in Asia, with a government and army of its own. At home it had had a checkered career. As the result of bitter attacks in the seventeenth century it widened its membership, but it still maintained the monopoly of trade with Asia till 1793, when it conceded to private merchants a certain share in the trade with India.

252. Peculiar character of the English colonies.—It is to the continent of America that we must turn for the field outside of Europe that in its performances and in its promises offered most to English commerce. After the early period of exploration, treasure-hunting, and piracy, English colonization in America developed in a form entirely its own. Emigrants went out, not to seek gold mines or to establish trading stations, but to found homes. Emigration was not so much a government policy as a popular movement, that attracted some of the best stock of English blood. There were great differences between the people of the different colonies on the Atlantic coast, as every student of American history knows, and there was again a difference between the colonies in the South and those on the islands. But in general it may be said that no European country could vie with England in the commercial quality of its colonial population. Certainly none could rival England in the quantity of colonists of European stock. The first census of the United States in 1790 showed a population (nearly four million), merely in this group of former English colonies, amounting to nearly half that in England and Wales.

253. Resources and industries of the colonies in America.—Though the personal qualities of the English were duplicated on the other side of the Atlantic, the physical environment was absolutely different. Products of the field, the forest, and the sea, which were eagerly desired and hard to get in England, were to be had in abundance in the New World. The conditions for manufacture, on the other hand, were unfavorable; capital and labor found such an attractive field in the extractive industries (the production of raw material), that there was little temptation for the colonies to engage in the finishing of goods. In the plantation colonies of the South and the islands almost nothing was manufactured. Even in the center and North, where the difficulties of life and the talents of the people made manufacture more practicable, most industries were of a household character, rough clothing and implements being made in the spare hours at home; or were ordinary village trades,—milling, tanning, etc. All the fine manufactures were bought from England with raw or semi-raw products.

254. Specialties of different colonies.—The island colonies (Jamaica, Barbadoes, etc.) sent plantation products. The sugar-cane supplied sugar and molasses and, by a simple process of manufacture, rum. American cotton until Whitney’s invention of the cotton-gin in 1793 came almost entirely from the islands, and indigo and various drugs were secured from the same source. The colonies on the mainland supplied a greater variety of products, by reason of their climatic differences. Nearly all of them contributed to the supply of skins and furs; and lumber and naval stores (pitch, tar, turpentine) were secured from the forests all the way from New England to Georgia. Different sections, however, had their specialties; the Carolinas sent rice, Virginia tobacco, New England codfish and whale-oil.

255. Commerce with Africa.—There was a marked peculiarity in the commerce with Africa. The exports to this country always exceeded the direct imports by a considerable sum. An English writer of the eighteenth century tells about the manufactures which were sent out, and continues: “we have, in return, gold, teeth (i.e., ivory), wax, and negroes; the last whereof is a very beneficial traffic to the kingdom, as it occasionally gives so prodigious an employment to our people both by sea and land.” His meaning is this: the slave trade was so “beneficial” because the slaves which were purchased with beads and rum were not brought to England but shipped to the American colonies where they were put to work. The English figured, therefore, that they got not only the price of the slaves in American products, but also had the business of carrying them to America, and could hope for a future return from their labor in the field. It is estimated that 20,000 slaves a year were sent out during the eighteenth century, and the chief port of the trade, Liverpool, employed 190 ships as slavers in 1771.

256. (6) Shipping and the carrying trade.—At the beginning of the period which we are studying (1500-1600) the English, as we have seen, where emancipating themselves from their former dependence on foreign ships. In the course of the period they learned to carry not only their own goods but those of other nations as well, and took from the Dutch the leadership in the carrying trade of the world. The reader will note, if he refers to the figures showing the trade of England about 1800, that the imports amounted to about 42 million pounds, while the exports of British merchandise were but 29 millions. England would seem to have been gaining a great amount of goods for nothing, or to have been going in debt for them. The difference is to be explained in part by the earnings of English freight, which other countries paid in wares, but in the larger part by the export of goods which were brought to England from other countries merely to be transshipped and exported again. At the close of the century foreign merchandise to the value of over 11 millions was exported, the wares being mainly those of colonial origin (coffee, sugar, Indian textiles, tobacco, tea, indigo, etc.).

257. Struggle of English seamen and government with the Dutch.—Two separate sets of forces were at work to raise the English merchant marine, those of individuals and those of the government. The English in the seventeenth century could not navigate as cheaply as the Dutch, since they required larger crews for the same work, but they seem in the eighteenth century to have been abreast or ahead of the general development of navigation; and unusual facilities for ship-building were offered to them in their American colonies. The government, on the other hand, was eager to foster every effort to extend English shipping, not only because of its economic advantage, but because of the addition to the naval resources of the kingdom in war with other powers. Until after 1650 the English merchant marine, in spite of individuals and government, was greatly inferior to the Dutch. Statements which are doubtless exaggerated give us still some measure of the difference; the Dutch were said to own four fifths of all the ships engaged in oceanic commerce, or as many as eleven kingdoms of Christendom; ten Dutch ships traded to Barbadoes for one English. The latter half of the seventeenth century is filled with a bitter struggle for supremacy between the English and the Dutch, waged with all the weapons both of peace and war.

258. The Navigation Acts; victory of English over Dutch shipping.—“The first nail in the coffin of Dutch greatness,” says an English historian, was the Navigation Act passed under Cromwell in 1651. This was but one of a series of measures extending before and afterward, designed to further the English carrying trade at the expense of rivals. Briefly, goods from a European country could be brought to England only in English ships or in ships of the country, so that, for instance, the Dutch could not carry Baltic wares to England; while the products of other continents could be imported or exported only in English ships; and some wares that were enumerated (sugar, tobacco, etc.) must be brought to England before they could be exported to any other European country. To maintain this policy the English engaged in a long contest with smugglers in America, and fought several great naval wars with the Dutch. The result was, as we have seen, a victory for English commerce over the Dutch, though it is hard to say how much credit should be given the government policy, and how much was due to the energy of the individuals who were building up English business at this period.

The effect of the new oceanic trade was to build up the ports in the West; Liverpool came into prominence in the eighteenth century, and Bristol also grew. The distribution of trade among the ports did not, however, change greatly. An estimate of the eighteenth century gave to London still two thirds of the total, while the remaining third was divided in equal parts among the ports of the east, the south, and the west coasts.

259. (7) Government policy. Commerce and war.—Just as in shipping, so in other commercial interests, the efforts of individuals to make money for themselves were restrained or furthered by government regulations aiming to advance the English people as a whole. Every matter of commerce was at the same time a matter of politics. Mention was made in an introductory chapter of the part played by England in the great wars of the period. It will be remembered that English policy in general was characterized by a shrewd recognition of the commercial advantages to be gained in war, either by territorial acquisitions or by trading privileges, and every war in which England engaged ended, as a rule, with a treaty that gave her some new colonial market or some advantages in trade with a European country. England fought France consistently, not because of old traditions of enmity, but because France was a commercial rival, refusing English manufactures and attempting to market her own in England, and because France had possessions in America and India that England desired. England allied herself with Portugal, on the other hand, because the trade of the two countries was complementary rather than competitive.

260. Customs policy.—The customs policy of the period was governed by mercantilist ideas, described in an earlier chapter. The government drew a considerable portion of its revenue from the customs duties, but nevertheless subordinated the collection of revenue to other considerations in framing the tariff, and regarded it chiefly as a means of building up national power in contest with other states. To further this end the importation of manufactured wares was in many cases taxed or prohibited, that foreigners might not draw money for work which Englishmen were thought competent to do. Raw materials, like wool, which could be used as the basis of English industries, were kept in the country by duties or prohibitions on export; while the export of other wares, which put foreigners in debt to England, was encouraged. Other measures, now inconceivable, were designed to stimulate certain industries; an Englishman could be buried only in a woolen shroud; a Scotchman only in Scotch linen; buttons and button-holes were regulated by legislation; English ships must carry English sails.

261. Burden of the tariff.—In a sense it is wrong to speak of any “system” of customs policy at this time, for the tariff, by constant changes, had become extraordinarily confused, and included many inconsistencies. “The collection and administration of such a complicated system was most wasteful; while the taxes, when taken together, were so high as to interfere seriously with the consumption of the article and to offer a great temptation to the smuggler.” The most rigorous measures failed to stop the smuggling which brought into England a large proportion of the goods on which duties or prohibitions were imposed. Reforms attempted by different statesmen alleviated to some extent the burden of the tariff on merchants, but left it still so heavy and cumbrous that with the advances of the nineteenth century it was felt to be intolerable. In this period almost no one thought of free trade. The tariff undoubtedly stimulated the growth of certain industries (silk, for example), but it is noteworthy that the cotton industry, which was destined to become the most important of any in England, grew up not only without any favor but under actual discouragements.

262. Colonial policy.—An English historian who has been quoted several times before said that England “conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” implying that the movement was one of natural expansion rather than of conscious policy. This seems true when we contrast English colonization with that of other powers. Still, the government held from the first the idea that the colonies were a part of the home country, and should contribute in special ways to its advancement, and these ideas grew stronger and took more definite form as the colonies grew in size. The government permitted the movement of men and capital to America under the condition that the resources of the colonies should be made to supplement, not compete with, the resources of the mother country. We have to note here the regulations in which the government ideas were embodied.

263. Restrictions on colonial enterprise, regarded as justifiable at the time.—By the application of the Navigation Acts the colonists were required to employ English ships for their commerce, and to send certain enumerated wares of their production to England before they could be disposed of to another country; and by other acts they were restricted in the manufacture or exchange of certain articles (woolens, hats, bar-iron, and steel) for which English manufacturers desired to reserve the market. Aside from these restrictions the colonists were left free to produce and to trade as they pleased. They paid the usual duties, as a rule, on wares entering the English ports, but were allowed a drawback when the wares were exported again.

Comparing these restrictions with, for instance, those of Spain, we are struck with their liberality; still more so when it is added that the government gave some special favors to the colonists in the form of bounties, and colonial ships were put on an equal footing with those built at home, so that New England was a great gainer by the stimulus to ship-building and sailing. England was the natural market for most of the colonial wares, and the colonists, as we have seen, had few temptations to go into manufacturing. None of these restrictions, therefore, bore with great weight on the colonists, and an attempt to interfere in their trade with the French West Indies (by the Molasses Act of 1733) was evaded. The English colonial system was accepted as natural and reasonable by the colonists in general until shortly before the Revolution.

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